We got to watch the debate last night before I had to jump on my truck and make another run, and it was about as bad as any we’ve ever seen. It was, essentially, a battle of limited wits between two flaming liberals. I had hopes for a major sea-change on the part of McCain, since he had recently actually gone on the attack and pressed issues than he should have been pressing from the beginning; but no, it was not to be, and it may be (and probably is) that the train has left the station, and McCain is not on board.

Part of the problem may have been that it was not as advertised, a “Town Hall” meeting. People were not free to dialogue directly with the candidates in a back and forth manner. Brokaw cherry-picked each and every question and questioner, rather than allowing the candidates to just talk directly to the people. No moderator was really needed here. McCain was not at his best; this was just another moderated “debate” with questions from a moderator.

I would have thought that McCain, as an ex-fighter pilot, would still have some killer instinct in him that, once summoned, would put him on the determined, persistent attack. It turned out that Obama is a better debater. Which many of us would discount, but many more of us do not discount. Most people, I’m afraid, do not go into issues substantively. They go more by appearances, and gotcha-phrases, and smoothness, and unflappability, and “coolness.” As much as I hate to say it, looks and strong voice and charisma are quite likely to carry the day in this Presidential race. McCain needed a knockout, and he didn’t deliver.

And, now that we know that he’s actually contemplating using our tax dollars to buy up some mortgage foreclosures in order to allow people who didn’t pay their bills to stay in the houses they didn’t pay for, we can see that it doesn’t really make much difference anyway. He’s almost as Leftist as Obama.

While Obama is, quite obviously, a flat out Marxist, steeped in Socialist theory and determined to use the highest level of government to solve every single problem that exists, it is now equally obvious that McCain is, at the very least, a philosophical Communist who probably doesn’t even know what he is. Obama’s policies clearly oppose Capitalism; McCain’s policies interfere with the free market, at the very least. They both look to the highest level of government to solve all the problems on earth. All you have to do is look at what they both said.

They both see health care (or health care insurance) as some sort of automatic entitlement, or even as a Constitutional right of everybody, and they both see the federal government as the proper guarantor of that entitlement; they only snipe at each other and quibble over details.

They both see home ownership as some sort of automatic entitlement, or even as a Constitutional right of everybody, and they both see the federal government as the proper guarantor of that entitlement; they only snipe at each other and quibble over details.

They both blame and demonize Wall Street for the current financial crisis, rather than years and years of government action, from 1929 until now, as documented in the 2008 Financial Crisis page. Both want to use the federal government to reign in and regulate, perhaps unto death, the very free market, or what’s left of it, that made us the economic giant that we are.

They both are certain, certain, that:

global warming is man-induced;

man can do something about the global climate;

the highest level of government must be fully engaged, at whatever cost, to do this something.

No one on earth can produce any incontrovertible empirical evidence that the problem they both seek to solve at our expense even truly exists. None. They only snipe at each other and quibble about details; they are both quite certain of their positions.

They both envision elaborate plans to get us into alternative fuels and alternative vehicles and alternative sources of energy, and that’s fine, but they both, again, see the highest level of government to be the proper guarantor and even producer of these gains, rather than the free market. As on other issues, they only snipe at each other and quibble over details. Neither of them are smart enough to know that if any of their alternatives were truly viable and cost effective, the free market would have already brought them into being and into use just as soon as they were viable and cost effective.

New advances and new things are always, always, brought into being sooner and better by a free people operating in a free market place than by any government edict. The notion that it is the other way round is an old Marxist notion, just as is the notion that everything is better run or done by government.

Lenin, a real dummy, learned all that he knew about business by listening to stories from friends who occasionally sat in business offices. In his view, running a business involved scribbling, recording and ciphering. He applied how to run a business to how to run a people. Thus he declared, “accounting and control” are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of a whole society. But these chores, he opined, had already been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipt, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic. Here we have the “philosophy” of the filing clerk in its full glory. (The Anti-Capitalist Mentality; Ludwig Von Mises, Libertarian Press, 1972, pg 24.)

Obama wants to order us into energy independence within ten years, based on how John F. Kennedy ordered us onto the moon within ten years. And maybe he can. But he cannot do it as cost-effectively or as profitably or as efficiently as a free market can do it. And a free market, very importantly, can sustain it and do it profitably, without adding any debt burden to the people, unlike a federal government.

When an old time Russian Bolshevik spoke the words ”The Party”, and when the old time German National Socialist Worker spoke the words ”Der Staadt”, the words were accompanied by a slight softening of the voice, a slight glistening of the eye, a slight nodding of the head, indicating a reference to something higher and greater than one of us or each of us. It was a reference to the new God-State, and the speaker envisioned himself as the keeper and preserver of the new liturgy and sacred creed, who passed on bits of the new divine wisdom to the rest of us. That’s how the bureaucrat views himself: to align yourself with the new divine will is to be patriotic. Socialism is made out of bureaucracy. The two terms are almost synonymous. When God is driven out of anything, something will take His place.

As I said in the 2008 Financial Crisis page, Obama’s spending plans are in near mirror image to the plans of Hoover and Roosevelt that caused, deepened and prolonged the Great Depression, which didn’t end until World War II. The situation was strikingly similar. Market crash, followed by giant government spending on social programs accompanied by tax increases. Poof. There went the boom.

In more recent history, Bush I took office, referred to Reagan’s supply-side hands-off policies as “voodoo economics”, and turned the Reagan boom into a new recession in less than a year and a half. (Supply Side includes inducements to get people to go to work; Leftists like to induce people to not go to work, but still receive some benefits, such as unemployment, paid leave, etc., or to work minimally, as when guaranteed a specific wage, no matter what.)

The only real reason I see to vote for McCain over Obama now, is that, once we have ourselves a President Obama (gag; puke; choke;) the country will be run essentially by three people: Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Extreme Leftists all. Extreme anti-Judao-Christian morality all. Imagine the Supreme Court they would saddle us with, for untold decades to come. We would be looking at the rise of militant secularism and of Marxism, and direct opposition to our weakly enduring national ethos. To be replaced with the ethos of BMDFP and Democrats.

The only bright spot in this whole mess is Sara Palin, perhaps a good future President. Right now she represents, clearly, the best man standing among the four who are running. But she’s not at the top of the ticket.